Significant commitments are about to be made on a strategy that has never been independently examined. Drift rarely comes from bad decisions — it comes from a long sequence of reasonable ones.
Typical symptoms
- Strategy decks that keep being revised but never resolved
- Leadership alignment that is polite rather than real
- A sense that the biggest risk is the assumption nobody has tested
What businesses commonly misdiagnose
Often treated as an alignment or communication problem — more workshops, more offsites. What is usually missing is not agreement but examination: someone senior, external and unburdened by the plan's history.
The diagnostic approach
A second perspective is not a second opinion. It is a structured diagnosis of the business as it is — market, customer, proposition, economics — before the strategy is locked.